Date: 22-Jul-2011 From: Heather McDowell <heatherjmcdowellyahoo.co.uk>Subject: The Relationship Between Phonological Awareness And Alphabetic Literacy With Reference To L1 Chinese Users of L2 EnglishE-mail this message to a friend

Dissertation Title: The Relationship Between Phonological Awareness And Alphabetic Literacy With Reference To L1 Chinese Users of L2 English

Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics

Dissertation Director(s): Marjorie Perlman Lorch Zhu Hua

Dissertation Abstract:

Phonological awareness is considered fundamentally important to literacy acquisition; however, the exact nature of its relationship with alphabetic literacy appears complex. Individuals who are illiterate, preliterate or literate only in a non-alphabetic script display minimal amounts of phonemic awareness; meanwhile, L1 English adults are subject to orthographic effects in phonological awareness tasks. This confirms a close association between phonological awareness and orthography but raises questions concerning the validity of phonemic awareness as an independent construct. Crucially, previous research has also demonstrated weak phonemic awareness despite years of alphabetic literacy in the specific case of L2 English users from Hong Kong, coupled with strong performance by Mainland Chinese Pinyin-literates. It is therefore important to explore the extent of the phonological awareness displayed by these groups, in the light of their differing linguistic and educational backgrounds.

This thesis is an empirical investigation designed to build a fine-grained picture of the phonological awareness of teenage L1 Chinese users of L2 English from Mainland China and Hong Kong, alongside age-matched L1 English participants. A number of new differentiated phonological awareness tests and stimuli were created to enable examination of performance across a range of controlled phonological, orthographic and lexical environments.

Results indicate weak phonemic awareness in the Hong Kong group, while Mainland Chinese participants gained high phonemic awareness scores but experienced difficulty in syllable segmentation. Meanwhile, the English group demonstrated extensive but not fully elaborated phonological awareness. Performance varied across tasks and stimuli, with group-specific patterns suggestive of susceptibility to certain orthographic and phonological anipulations. This points to phonological awareness being highly differentiated and derived from multiple input sources including phonology, orthography and explicit training. It is suggested that the relationship between phonological awareness and alphabetic literacy forms a complex interaction which may display specific features in groups with differing L1 and L2 literacy.